As I did last year and the year before, I’m making a Best of the Year list following the conventional system for what counts as a 2016 film, mainly the nonsensical and ahistorical system that decrees that critics may only consider movies to have existed once they have played for a week in a commercial venue in New York City, or, in a new twist this year, on a television or streaming service in New York. This is the system that claims my favorite film of 2013 (La última película), which played for a week in Seattle in 2014, can only be considered a 2015 film because that is when it finally got a New York release, although it played Los Angeles for the first time in 2016. Not to mention the absurdity that my favorite film from 1991, Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, qualifies for this list, along with a 30 year old Edward Yang movie and an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie I saw in Vancouver in 2012. But alas, we all must bow to convention, however silly, every once in awhile.

My 2016 list of course will never be finalized, as there’s no such thing as a final list here at The End: there are always more new movies to discover and old movies to reevaluate. But in a couple of weeks I’ll have the nominations up for the 2016 Endy Awards, with the winners to be announced during the Academy Awards ceremony. This list is a snapshot of my favorites of 2016 as they stand now, on the last day of the year.

1. Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata)

2. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

3. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)

4. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)

5. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke)

6. Elle (Paul Verhoeven)

7. Lemonade (Beyoncé Knowles & Kahlil Joseph)

8. Things to Come Mia Hansen-Løve)

9. SPL 2: A Time for Consequences (Soi Cheang)

10. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

11. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

12. Sully (Clint Eastwood)

13. Sunset Song (Terence Davies)

14. The Love Witch (Anna Biller)

15. The Terrorizers (Edward Yang)

16. Three (Johnnie To)

17. Kaili Blues (Bi Gan)

18. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo)

19. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)

20. The Mermaid (Stephen Chow)

21. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (Karan Johar)

22. The Age of Shadows (Kim Ji-woon)

23. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick)

24. The Thoughts that Once We Had (Thom Andersen)

25. Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

26. Hail, Caesar! (The Coen Brothers)

27. Crosscurrent (Yang Chao)

28. The Edge of Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig)

29. I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang)

30. The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Serra)

31. Tower (Keith Maitland)

32. Rogue One (Gareth Edwards)

33. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)

34. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)

35. Train to Busan (Yeon Sangho)

36. OJ: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

37. De Palma (Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow)

38. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)

39. Short Stay (Ted Fendt)

40. Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

41. The Witch (Robert Eggers)

42. My Beloved Bodyguard (Sammo Hung)

43. A Train Arrives at the Station (Thom Andersen)

44. The Wasted Times (Cheng Er)

45. One Night Only (Matt Wu)

46. Indefinite Pitch (James Kienitz Wilkins)

47. SoulMate (Derek Tsang)

48. Call of Heroes (Benny Chan)

49. Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to Be Special (Riki Lindhome & Jeremy Konner)

We’re coming down to the end of 2016 (at last!) and so here’s one last rankings update before all the lists and whatnot at the end of December. Since my last update I’ve written about I am Not Madame Bovary and Old Stone at Seattle Screen Scene and Sky on Fire at MUBI. I also appeared on the Snakes and Funerals podcast talking about Jean Renoir’s American Films.

These are the movies I’ve watched or rewatched over the last few weeks and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.

I’m off to Vancouver in a couple of days for the Film Festival (here’s my proposed schedule) and I’ll be writing about what I see there over at Seattle Screen Scene. I’ll have an index over here of my coverage as well of course.

I’ve been watching fewer movies this year, mostly because as my kids get older it’s become easier to read books. I’ve read more this year than the past five years, since kid #1 was born) put together. Here’s a ranked list of what I’ve read (and finished) so far this year:

We are now halfway through the year and as has become an annual tradition here at The End, it’s time to look back at the best movies of the year so far. As I discussed in the 2013 halfway post, the consensus movie-dating system is nonsensical and posits New York as the center of the universe. Far more logical (and much easier to use) is a system reliant on imdb’s dating system, which locates a film in whatever year it first played for an audience. That’s what we use here for all Rankings & Awards as it’s the most fair to all eras and areas. (A dating system reliant on playing in a certain locality I think can be valuable for a publication that is geographically specific, like a local newspaper or website. We’ll be putting together a Seattle-specific lists for Seattle Screen Scene later this week, for example. But here at The End, we have a global reach.)

A by-product of the system is that a number of films that first go into wide-release in any given year actually had their premiere in the year before. A number of the films on many critics’ halfway-thorough lists include these films, films that find their proper home here on my 2015 list. And so here we have two lists: the Best Movies of 2016, following the strict imdb dating system, and the Best 2015 Movies of 2016, which includes those films from last year that you might find on a more chronologically-illogical list (and despite the title, also includes one film from 1991 and one from 2012, both of which only premiered in New York this year). I also have a third list, Best Unreleased Movies of 2015, of last year’s films that have yet to see a New York release and therefore don’t (yet) exist by the standards of most critics. And a fourth list, a halfway version of my annual Best Older Movies list, counting the top movies I saw for the first time this year that are more than a few years old.